[ecrea] CFP International Symposium: Towards an Ecology of Data. Political and Scientific Issues of Digital Data.

Call for Paper

International Symposium

Towards an Ecology of Data.

Political and Scientific Issues of Digital Data.

February 14th, 2013

Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS (ISCC)

20 rue Berbier-du-Mets, Paris, France





There is currently a growing number of data produced and disseminated in 
professional, public and scientific spaces. These data come from various 
sources: governments posting their operational data within Open Data 
initiatives, companies opening non-strategic data, scientists 
increasingly sharing banks of data, or Internet users.

Traditional ways of processing data seem insufficient in front of these 
big data. This fact calls for new means of thinking how to extract, 
store (grids, cloud computing ...), share, analyze and visualize data. 
The Web 2.0 related term “data science” (i.e. extracting, processing, 
analyzing data) now concerns a large number of activities similarly 
facing large data sets, such as scientific research or data journalism.

This symposium will cover the theoretical and practical implications of 
social research based on data. It calls for critical works that identify 
the quantitative leap induced by large masses of data available for 
social sciences, and the related disciplinary and epistemological 
consequences, e.g. notions of author or producer, public and private 
actors strategies, citizen uses of data, emerging ecosystems of data 
processing, local initiatives currently developing Open Data services 
and applications with related business issues.

Epistemological reflections, work in progress and position papers are 
welcome and can cover one of the following areas:



1. Digital data and social sciences: History and Epistemology

Large data corpora have been processed for a long time within scientific 
practices: what is the precise nature of the qualitative leap brought by 
current technologies? Does the presence of massive data change social 
science practices? What are the needs, expectations, challenges and 
emerging solutions? Do these new methods of processing digital data 
imply epistemological changes?

2. The politics of Open Data, citizen participation and local eco-systems.

In recent years, Open Data initiatives have been set off by both law 
changes and actors’ specific demands. It aims to make public data 
available and reusable. This movement raises many questions: Is it a 
public service improvement, a regional development tool? What is the 
relationship between supply and demand, top/down and bottom/up 
initiatives? Who are those who really understand the data? Can these 
uses be interpreted as civic empowerment or democracy renewal, as 
suggested by the proximity between "Open Data" and "Open Government"? 
How can traditional participatory democracy use these data? What are the 
possible links between public data and already implemented territorial 
e-democracy practices?



3. New sociotechnical mediations, training and professionalization.

Which elements should compose the knowledge base necessary to understand 
issues around these data? What are the new forms of mediation 
facilitating citizen uses of released data and its applications? This 
third axis will highlight, for each category of actors, the type of 
skills required to be able to understand the data ecosystem in all its 
complexity, from technical to political aspects. What are the solutions 
implemented by the various professions facing this flow of data? What 
types of mediation would increase effective ownership of released data 
by civil society? What are the training needs to sustain and develop 
these efforts? How are these new forms of data management skills 
reorganizing professions (particularly journalism), companies and 
administrations involved in Open Data?



Submission

We welcome proposals based on current experiments, theoretical 
reflections and comparative analysis. They can be written in English or 
in French.

Proposals should be 1000 words long, short bibliography included. 
Selected contributions will be published in a special issue of a 
French-speaking academic journal.



Proposals should be sent to:

Clément Mabi: (clement.mabi /at/ utc.fr) and Jean-Christophe Plantin: 
(jean-christophe.plantin /at/ utc.fr)



Deadlines

• Deadline for submission of proposals: November 15th 2012

• Notification of acceptance: December 15th 2012

• Symposium: February 14th 2013



Scientific Committee

David Berry (Swansea University, College of Arts and Humanities)

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay (CNRS-ISCC)

Clément Mabi (UTC-Costech)

Jean-Christophe Plantin (UTC-Costech)

Bernard Rieder (University of Amsterdam, Media studies department)

Valérie Schafer (CNRS-ISCC)

Laurence Smith-Monnoyer (UTC-Costech)

Bruno J. Strasser (Université de Genève & Yale University)

Stéphanie Wojcik (UPEC-Ceditec)


--
Jean-Christophe Plantin

Doctorant Contractuel
Sciences de l'information et de la communication
Université de Technologie de Compiègne
Laboratoire Costech/Equipe EPIN

Mob: + 33 (0)6 50 86 15 60
Blog: cartonomics.org
Twitter: @jcplantin




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